Aperture gives you all the tools you need to uncover the hidden potential in your photos. It brings you even more advanced ways to organize, browse, and perfect images.So you can make every shot your best shot.

Import

Aperture and iPhoto. All your photos. All in one place.

For the first time ever, photos from Aperture and iPhoto come together in one unified library.1 You can open the library from either app and make adjustments to your photos. There’s no need to import, export, or reprocess photos from one app to the other — just open your library and go. Faces, Places, Albums, and Smart Albums work across both apps, too. You can use Aperture to make professional edits, then go back to iPhoto to create a calendar or cards. It’s the library that’s sometimes pro, sometimes not, and always convenient.

Find your best shots. Fast.

Aperture gets right to work on import. It uses camera-generated previews more efficiently, so you don’t have to wait to see your shots. You can browse your photos and make your selects right away. While files are importing, Aperture grabs data like shutter speed, aperture, lens, and focus points and starts sorting your photos. It can also add keywords, apply adjustment effects, and back up your original images to a second drive automatically. Aperture can then store photos in the unified library, in their original folders, or on an external drive. And it automatically adds photos to your Photo Stream in iCloud.

Organize

Organize by Faces.

The popular Faces feature in iPhoto has even more power in Aperture. As in iPhoto, Faces uses face detection technology to find faces in your photos. Once you identify a person, Faces quickly scans your library, or an individual project, to find more photos of that person. Let’s say you want to find photos of the bride’s father in a specific wedding project. Once you’ve identified his face in one photo, Faces finds other photos he appears to be in. You simply confirm the suggested matches to apply his name to those photos.

Organize by Places.

There’s no easier way to organize photos than with Places. Places converts location data from GPS-enabled cameras and geo-tracker devices into common location names. Then it displays those locations as pins on the Places map. If your camera doesn’t capture GPS data, you can assign locations by dragging your photos to the map. Later, when browsing your photos, just click the location pin on the map and all the photos shot there are instantly displayed.

Organize any way you want.

Group your projects by year or organize them in hierarchical folders to bring order to even the largest photo library. Add descriptive keywords and other metadata, then use the powerful Aperture search engine to find photos based on almost any criteria.

Organize Using Faces and Places

Find out how to organize your photo library according to where photos were shot or who’s in them.

Your Photo Stream takes care of itself.

Your Photo Stream in iCloud is a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos, ready to view whenever you want with a single click.2 Once your photos have been imported from your Photo Stream into your library, you can edit or rearrange them any way you like. You can choose to have all the photos in your Photo Stream imported to your photo library automatically, organized by the month and year they were taken. Or turn off auto-import to manually move the photos you want, when you want. Learn more about Photo Stream

Compare and Select

Browse photos full screen.

Use every inch of your beautiful Apple display to make selects and compare images side by side. Browse your photos at high speed, instantly navigating between projects. When it’s time to make selects, use ratings, flags, and color labels to organize your best shots. Use the Loupe to examine detail, or zoom and pan multiple images at once.

Perfect and Enhance

Easily add effects.

Give your photos a cross-processed or vintage camera look. Make the colors pop. Convert them to a perfectly toned black and white. Aperture includes dozens of effects that transform your photos — even across an entire project. With just a click, you can apply processing techniques and styles, correct color, and enhance images. You can also create and save your own effects so you can apply them easily. Advanced white balance corrects color throughout your image. Professional Auto Enhance intelligently applies a powerful set of adjustments to your photos. Aperture also recovers blown highlights and lifts shadow areas without flattening your images. Since all adjustments are nondestructive, you can revert back from the changes you make at any time or restore your original master images.

The Zoom Navigator displays a thumbnail to help you move around a zoomed image, so it’s even easier to find and perfect details.

Precision brushes.

Nondestructive brushes let you make selective adjustments to specific parts of your image without creating masks or layers. Control brush size, softness, and strength while you dodge and burn or apply effects such as blurring, skin smoothing, and polarization. Fifteen Quick Brushes handle the most common touch-up jobs with a few strokes. Detect Edges makes it easy to retouch areas with greater accuracy — deepening the colors of a mountain range, for instance, while leaving the sky untouched.

Share

Custom multimedia slideshows.

Create impressive multimedia slideshows with photos, custom titles, HD videos, and layered soundtracks. It’s as easy as dragging your photos and videos into one of the themed slideshow templates in Aperture. If you want a more customized slideshow, you can choose the Classic or Ken Burns theme and control transitions, background and border colors, and the font, size, and style of your titles. Sharing slideshows is simpler, too. Aperture exports your slideshows to iTunes so you can sync them to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, then share them anywhere.

Export. Easy.

When you’re ready to share your photos, you can send them to SmugMug Flickr, or Facebook with a couple of clicks. Or take advantage of a variety of export plug-ins to upload photos directly to sites including Zenfolio, iStockphoto, and PhotoShelter. Because Aperture is integrated with the OS X Media Browser, you can easily include photos from your library in iLife or iWork documents. Or make them “to go” by syncing them to your iPad, iPhone, iPod or Apple TV.

Sharing photo libraries requires Aperture 3.3 and iPhoto 9.3.

iCloud requires iOS 5 or later on iPhone 3GS or later, iPod touch (3rd generation or later), iPad, or iPad mini; a Mac computer with OS X Lion or later; or a PC with Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8 (Outlook 2007 or 2010 or an up-to-date browser is required for accessing email, contacts, and calendars). Some features require iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion. Some features require a Wi-Fi connection. Some features are not available in all countries. Access to some services is limited to 10 devices.